D-Diary: Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party #10

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And a little U2, too.

By Robert Brinkmann

In an effort to further illuminate the entire filmmaking process, over the course of the next few months we will be covering all facets of production of the independent film Stephen Tobolowsky's Birthday Party, from conception up through its current festival run and eventual distribution.

We've said it before and we'll say it again &#Array; producing an independent film is a difficult process, made all the more difficult when the budget is small.

Stephen Tobolowsky's name may not leap off the page at you like a Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, or a Mel Gibson, but rest assured you've seen his work &#Array; probably dozens of times, in numerous films&#Array; Films like Mississippi Burning, Groundhog Day, Spaceballs, Sneakers, Memento, Thelma and Louise &#Array; the list literally goes on and on.

Director/Producer Robert Brinkmann has placed his cameras in front of Stephen as he prepares for, and hosts, his birthday party, capturing some amazing stories in the process. Essentially a series of monologues, the film is able to hold its grip on the viewer through the sheer power of Tobolowsky's abilities as a storyteller, as he tells tales as wide-ranging as a dolphin encounter off the California coast to being held at gunpoint while shopping in his hometown grocery store.

Each week, Brinkmann (who has worked as a cinematographer on films ranging from U2's Rattle & Hum to The Cable Guy) will take you behind the filmmaking process of this unique picture.

It's going to have to be a short one today&#Array; I'm fighting off a cold, I have been in production meetings all day, and I'm still not done sending out all the publicity materials for STBP. I have to be up early for a location scout and, though I haven't officially started work on the new movie yet, my week has been fully booked with pre-production events. I won't have time to rest or deal with the flu.

For four weeks, as most of my friends and my wife have all been sick, I have been able to fight off this nasty respiratory virus, but as I sat in the union mandated safety classes this weekend and had someone behind me coughing on me for a solid four hours in a room air conditioned to a pleasant environment for a full side of beef, it finally got to me. I wish, in addition to teaching you about scaffold safety and hazard communication, they would include some common courtesy lessons about not locking yourself in a room full of strangers when you're deathly ill. So, now I am on the brink of succumbing to this thing and see no good night's sleep in my immediate future.

STBP NEWS

It seems that we have accumulated critical mass. Not enough to actually start an uncontrolled chain reaction, but just so much that things are starting to happen on their own. I am fielding emails from theater owners across the country inquiring about showing our film on their own. We have been invited to another festival, this one in San Francisco, and we are getting a fair amount of press from the upcoming festivals.

SF SCREW UP

I had submitted to the San Francisco World Festival on the withoutabox.com website, thinking it was the big film festival in San Francisco. This week we received an invitation from the San Francisco Independent Film Festival. I told them that I was holding out for the San Francisco International Film Festival, but they realized my mistake and pointed out that the SFIFF, the big one, is about to start and I had probably submitted to the smaller and newer SWIFT by mistake. So, thanks to Tod from SF Indie Fest, I now realize that I mixed up SFIFF and SWIFT (don't confuse any of those with SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival) and blew our chance of getting into the most desirable, by which I mean largest, film festival in San Francisco.

IT ENDS WELL

So it may not be the largest, but it is the most fiercely independent film festival in San Francisco. Though it lessens our chances of getting into SWIFT, I accepted the invitation to the San Francisco Indie Fest. There is no way I want to repeat what happened in New York and be shut out of another big city with art house crowds. We don't have our screening times yet, but we are coming to San Francisco in May. And while we haven't gotten around to updating our website with everything, we now have the screening time for the Philadelphia FirstGlance Film Festival, the USA Film Festival in Dallas, and the RiverRun Film Festival in Winston-Salem. If you live in those areas, check them out and come to see us.

VERTIGO

As promised, I am including some pictures from the U2 show at the Staples arena in Los Angeles. The number of shows of theirs I have seen over the years is well into the triple digits, and they still manage to amaze me. It is simply the best live band I have ever seen, and they manage to grow and progress and come up with new stuff every time out. If you have never seen them live, or even if you have, this is a show worth seeing.

The tickets we had gotten clearly said "no cameras" on them and I was worried about losing my fabulous digital Elph to a security guard on the hunt for Osama, so I decided to leave it at home. Instead, I asked my friends Darren LeGallo and Amy Adams to take pictures on their cell phone. The quality is far from perfect, but then you can probably find perfect photos of U2 just about anywhere anyway. I have shot their concerts on 35mm film in B&W and color. I have shot them in 16mm film, in widescreen on 35mm, on Super 8 film, and I have even shot them on an old 4x5 Graflex still camera, but this is the first time on a cell phone. They work in any medium.

THE SHOW

I would be amiss, if I didn't say a few words about the lighting and stage design by Willie Williams. If you have followed the band and seen their shows, you will recognize a lot of the elements he is using in this one. It's not that he is copying himself, just that they have evolved over the years and recur in different incarnations. The video monitors from Zoo TV, which turned into the giant video screen from Pop Mart has now morphed with the big cloth background from the outdoor Rattle and Hum show to make several huge video curtains which are lowered and raised during the show. The stage design now combines various previous shapes and, once again, arcs right through the audience. You can see the manually operated overhead follow spots from Joshua Tree mixed in with much more recent Vari-lights, and there are still some remnants of the film lights introduced on Rattle and Hum. Jordan Cronenweth's lightning effect from the (color) concert in Tempe, Arizona, lives on as strobes all over the stage, and the ninelights I placed behind the band for "Helter Skelter" in the (black & white) Denver concert are there as well, though not as large as they once were. Willie manages to blend all these elements together and use them for ever better effect. The man who brought you Trabant automobiles mounted on the end of cherry picker cranes, maybe more understated here, but it is just as effective.

GOOD NIGHT

As much as I would like to go on pretending I am a Rolling Stone writer, I am going to have to call it a night. It's a tough week ahead and I need to get enough work done to be able to leave and travel to Dallas. I hope to be back in force next week with more pictures and more links. This week, if you want links to any of the festivals, just go to our website and use those. So, stay healthy, take your vitamins, and, if anybody should cough on you from any direction, don't worry about being rude and move as far away as you can.